Throwback post – One Woman’s Distribution

It’s not Thursday, but I’m going for a throwback post. I’ve been reflecting on my motivations recently and wanted to re-post this blog I wrote back in 2010, while a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger working with an NGO on their response to the food insecurity crisis that year. My role here was to document the distribution process and its many stories. This is one of the stories that continues to motivate me. Not surprisingly it involves a personal interaction – brief but meaningful – with one of the people affected by the crisis and there to receive food rations. 

Personal connections can often be lost in development and humanitarian response, through the sheer scale of the work, demands of funding, shiny new innovations, and the psychological distance aid workers must often put between themselves and the constant tragedy and poverty they see. But I do believe these personal stories are important to remind us of our ultimate purpose, creating the conditions and capabilities to improve the lives of people with their own stories, joys, sorrows, and possibilities.  To remind us, in the words of former UNSG Dag Hammarskjold, that “without the warmth and humility you have to develop in your relations to the few with whom you are personally involved, you will never be able to do anything for the many.” 

 

One Woman’s Distribution
23-24 July, 2010, outside of Dosso, Niger

I went to a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Dosso city. This was the only urban area where we were distributing food rations, and here crowds were much rowdier compared with rural villages. But I was intensely moved listening to people’s stories of struggle and survival.

I first noticed Fatima hovering on the edges of one crowd, with her 16 month-old daughter Aicha tied to her back with a piece of cloth. She looked lost, unsure of which line to stand in. I asked if we could chat a bit, and take their photo. Somewhat shyly, she agreed.

This young woman lives alone in Dosso with her 4 children, and no regular source of income. “My husband went away to find work” she said. “He washes clothes.” Neither of them have a field to plant.

The distribution began Friday to over 800 families. They were split into three groups, but the large, loud crowds made it impossible for everyone to hear their name called.

Fatima hovered by the far-right line, listening & waiting. She seemed intimidated by the scale of the process, and by the other women attempting to push their way into the lines. Like most of the crowd, she had arrived early in the morning, having eaten nothing all day. By mid-afternoon, she was tired.

“I’m just going to leave,” she said to me at one point, “whether or not I get food.” I insisted she stay, promising that her name was there somewhere. I wondered if she really intended to leave – or if she just needed to hear someone tell her not to.

In her face, her eyes, her bearing, I saw a deeper fatigue. She was tired not only from the anxiety and physical exertion of today, but also from the months of struggling to feed her children with little support. But she persisted, despite her fatigue and frustration.

A rainstorm hit about 5pm, and those still waiting were told to come back the next morning. At 9 on Saturday, I found Fatima waiting in the rightmost line again. Yesterday’s frustration had worn off, but she still hadn’t heard her name.

Finally she followed my suggestion to check in the other lines. About 5 minutes later I saw her standing in the middle line. “I found my name,” she said, beaming and knowing that, finally, her children would eat their fill tonight. But how she would get over 50 kg of maize back home? “We’ll get it there,” she said, too relieved at this moment to be worried about that. “Someone will bring it for us.”

Guide to systems part 2

A great, straightforward guide to systems from “Find What Works” (by Dave Algoso), that explains pretty well the different layers of thinking about systems. I summarize his post below about healthcare, but in the titles one could easily substitute just about any other field and add its own description. He distinguishes four levels of complexity, and refers to “zooming out” from Level 1 at the center to Level 4:

• Level 1 – “Thinking about healthcare”: Focused on the patient, and the doctor-patient interaction that offers prevention or treatment.
• Level 2 – “Thinking about healthcare systems”: Focused on all of the distinct elements that make that doctor-patient interaction possible (he cites: policy & governance; financing; physical facilities; patient access; workforce development; supply chains; health information systems)
• Level 3 – “Systems thinking about healthcare systems”: Systems thinking adds complexity by considering not just the impact of each element on patient care, but also on all the other elements of the system. (eg: effects of policy on supply chains or workforce development; effects of healthcare information on policy; effects of financing on access or facilities or supply chains…)
• Level 4 – “Systems thinking about healthcare”: At this level, Algoso says, we zoom out beyond the health care system and consider everything that affects health – environment, working conditions, water & sanitation, conflict & stability, food security, etc etc…

At each level, things get more and more complex, and interventions to improve healthcare will depend on what level of analysis we are using. I find this stuff fascinating, especially when it’s presented in such a clear, concise way. Next, I do a little thought exercise on using this analysis in a different context.

So now I take a stab…  [post #2]

Currently, my work focuses mostly on child protection in development programs. Just as a thought exercise, I’m using this as a basic framework and seeing how I would analyze child protection programs with this thought process. By “protection”, I am referring to Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 19, meant to ensure children are protected from all forms of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation.

Level 1 – Thinking about protection: 

Already, protection gets a bit more complicated. With healthcare, the clear center is interaction between health professional (doctor, nurse, CHW, birth assistant…) and the patient. However, with a child’s right to protection, the frontline duty-bearers can be a wide range of people. Parents, adults, teachers, health professionals, counselors and psycho-social professionals, case workers… all can have direct responsibility for ensuring a child’s right to protection in various situations. However, boiling it down to its essence, it is ultimately the responsibility of the child’s primary caregiver. So we’ll call this level the “child-caregiver interaction”.

The caregiver, like the doctor, is charged with protecting the child from myriad threats, both mitigating the risk and responding to threats and violations. At every stage of life, the primary caregiver must ensure that a child is safe from those forces that would harm her or him – from the smooth-talking agent who would traffic her to a brothel; from the powerful local businessman who would place him in working conditions too dangerous for his age; from the neighbor who would rape her. Indeed, within the family there may be risks: early marriage, beating, psychological abuse.

There is, however, a second sub-level here: protection by adults other than the primary caregiver. When the child is at school, teachers are responsible; when the child has lost their parents, the State is responsible for ensuring the child gets placed in a protective environment.

What types of interventions would fall under this level? Many NGOs act at this level, filling the caregiver role when the primary caregiver has neglected it, or educating parents and children about their rights. An NGO working to stop child marriages and convince parents to send girls to school instead would be working on child protection at Level 1.

Level 2 – Thinking about protection systems:

Zooming out to the “child protection system”, we now see all the many distinct elements of the system that contribute to – or detract from – child protection. These elements include (borrowing a bit from Algoso): laws & policies; traditional norms and customs about acceptable behavior; enforcement & punishment mechanisms, both formal and informal; children and caregivers’ knowledge of threats – both of the potential negative impacts and the likelihood of a rights violation in certain situations; physical infrastructure: care centers, protected homes, gender-separated public latrines; protection workforce, professionals and para-professionals, including case workers, law enforcement and legal personnel, psycho-social counselors; reporting mechanisms; information systems; financing of child protection initiatives.

Interventions here would include improving the legal framework or organizational policies; training response personnel (including law enforcement, legal personnel, health workers and counselors, case workers, local leaders, etc); working to change local attitudes about acceptable behavior towards children; building infrastructure better suited to protection (eg separated latrines); improving reporting systems, particularly by using technology that also improves information systems; or building capacity at the national level (eg through policymakers’ motivation, organizational structures, or revenue streams) to fund child protection systems.

I would put it at this level if it addressed only one or a few elements at a time. Hopefully, many of these are done at the same time; even better, they could be part of a coordinated response with each intervention considering how it may spark changes in other elements, which gets us to…

Level 3 – Systems thinking about protection systems:

Following Algoso’s guide, the next level out helps us see the interactions between all these distinct elements of the child protection system. In short, every lever we pull at one element will have ripple effects on all the others; applying systems thinking means trying to identify these effects and plan for them in a comprehensive response. And none of these are static or consistent effects, but they are constantly shifting. Yeah, it’s a bitch.

Maybe we’ve pushed through a better government policy on supporting children affected by AIDS, and made all the legislators feel good. But now they’ve moved on to the next issue without properly funding the implementation. Without that funding, our community case workers are underpaid and feel unsupported in their (emotionally taxing) work, and the professional workforce doesn’t have the resources to implement the new workforce development and promotion policy we helped them design. And maybe our community awareness campaign has, despite being participatory, offended traditional leaders since in their eyes it implied that they have a problem with this controversial subject. Now the community case workers – and the orphans and vulnerable children they’re supposed to protect – are more isolated in their own communities and not receiving necessary support from the government.

Systems interventions should be aware of what those ripple effects are likely to be, and focus on points of high leverage in the system. In particular, they should be attuned to possible differential effects and the potential for exclusion of certain groups (or opportunities for inclusion!). A change in the formal or informal rules may have different impacts on girls, on disabled children, on HIV-positive parents or children, or on different ethnic or religious groups.

In the sample intervention above, maybe the crucial delay in the system that we didn’t address was that group of traditional leaders or local opinion leaders, who can influence others to adopt a more caring attitude towards those children, smoothing the way for formal services and potentially even increasing local demand for services. Of course, we might also have to tailor our outreach to leaders of different religions or ethnic groups, and this tailoring should be developed with real input from local leaders, inclusion or gender experts, and representatives from marginalized groups to make sure nobody is left out.

Level 4 – Systems thinking about protection:

This level zooms out beyond the child protection system to look at all the larger environmental elements that impact protection. Here, the child-caregiver interaction is still in the center, but  This would include, of course…

Emergency situation: Clearly, any violent conflict or natural disaster expose children to direct threats, as well as indirect threats to the ability of parents, civil society, or governments to protect children from violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect.

Economic situation: Family poverty can have direct and indirect impacts on a child’s vulnerability to protection risks (again, differential impacts for boys and girls). In addition, the overall economic situation of a country affect those risks as well. For example, certain industries are prone to child labor in unregulated environments, such as gold mining, cocoa farming, shoe or garment manufacturing, and sex tourism – note both licit and illicit. (Of course there are many others.)

Social, cultural, or religious situation: Often, broader social or religious norms can raise different vulnerabilities for children to protection risks. For example, in Senegal, the high value placed on Koranic education leads some children to be exploited as street beggars.  In other situations, families that are socially isolated have fewer assets available to ensure child protection (eg HIV-positive parents or those who have been culturally shamed), as support of relatives or communities can often be crucial to a family’s ability to reduce vulnerability of their children.

Political situation: Political issues can have any number of unpredictable effects on child protection, whether it’s distracting attention, diverting resources, or actively creating a hostile environment. And not just the political situation in a given country, but also the global situation – eg, gag rules imposed by certain US administrations can prevent projects from talking about ways for girls to protect themselves from pregnancy or STDs; or sanctions imposed by global powers can limit a country’s ability to fund child protection initiatives.

Migration: Often linked, of course, to emergencies or economics, migration and urbanization can increase vulnerability by removing children and families from familiar people, norms, and situations – and by putting them under the radar of formal systems.

Technology: Mobile technology and the internet can expose children to risks but also allow innovative ways to address problems.

Even in these limited descriptions, I couldn’t avoid overlaps between these different elements. And of course, a lot of them (eg sanctions, negotiations to end conflicts, demand for cheap gold or shoes) may be too big for most NGOs to deal directly with. But interventions can still address key leverage points or delays in these larger systems that impact child protection issues. Algoso cites the adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” to suggest that NGOs can be effective by anticipating and addressing broader issues, and the ripple effects can help address protection issues as well. However, I think it’s unwise to rely on this sort of strategy without also monitoring those ripple effects and continuing to strategically intervene at other “zoomed-in” levels.

Still, with the obligatory no-silver-bullets disclaimer, this is a great framework for analyzing protection issues and designing responses.

 

A concise guide to systems from Find What Works

A great, straightforward guide to systems from “Find What Works” (by Dave Algoso), that explains pretty well the different layers of thinking about systems. I summarize his post below about healthcare, but in the titles one could easily substitute just about any other field and add its own description. He distinguishes four levels of complexity, and refers to “zooming out” from Level 1 at the center to Level 4:

• Level 1 – “Thinking about healthcare”: Focused on the patient, and the doctor-patient interaction that offers prevention or treatment.
• Level 2 – “Thinking about healthcare systems”: Focused on all of the distinct elements that make that doctor-patient interaction possible (he cites: policy & governance; financing; physical facilities; patient access; workforce development; supply chains; health information systems)
• Level 3 – “Systems thinking about healthcare systems”: Systems thinking adds complexity by considering not just the impact of each element on patient care, but also on all the other elements of the system. (eg: effects of policy on supply chains or workforce development; effects of healthcare information on policy; effects of financing on access or facilities or supply chains…)
• Level 4 – “Systems thinking about healthcare”: At this level, Algoso says, we zoom out beyond the health care system and consider everything that affects health – environment, working conditions, water & sanitation, conflict & stability, food security, etc etc…

At each level, things get more and more complex, and interventions to improve healthcare will depend on what level of analysis we are using. I find this stuff fascinating, especially when it’s presented in such a clear, concise way. Next, I do a little thought exercise on using this analysis in a different context.

Should NGOs be developing tax systems for poor countries?

As my accounting professor used to say, “it depends.” Or perhaps a more accurate answer is that NGOs shouldn’t be doing it all on their own, but they may have a role to play in the process.

Oxfam is talking about income inequality*. A recent briefing paper (discovered through Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog) makes the case that good public services can reduce inequality, as well as progressive tax systems. They cite analysis showing reduced economic inequality after taxes and public services, and note that services have been shown to reduce gender inequality as well. Arguing against austerity, Oxfam challenges governments to use reducing inequality as main policy goal.

In this paper, meant for policy advocacy, all the recommendations are for governments. But what does this suggest about the role of the international development community? Certainly, we’ve been in the business of providing public services in poor countries for a long time. The World Bank, INGOs, and donor agencies are all about getting more kids in school, more women and children surviving childbirth, more villages with access to potable water. Of course, times are changing (or at least goes the talk). Now international aid is increasingly going towards strengthening local systems for providing public services, instead of NGOs just building the schools and wells themselves. (Ok, it’s a slow transition…) Either way, NGOs are doing their part to reduce inequality and promote inclusive access to services, right?

Well, this paper doesn’t suggest there’s more than that, but the way they frame their analysis. It’s not just public services, and nor do taxes stand alone. Taxes, of course, help pay for public services, so a progressive tax system can have a multiplied impact on inequality.

This is an obvious point, but it’s one that is often left out when NGOs start asking how to improve public services in Country X or Y. They will be all over the free education policy and the water system administrator training – and increasingly, the social service workforce system, including stuff like helping build career paths and salary scales. But the sustainable financing of the whole thing – devising and implementing a system of progressive taxation – is pretty far out of non-profits’ areas of expertise, save for a few.

And, so it should be. That’s not where those donations or budget lines need to be going, hiring and training legions of tax experts to invade developing countries. Let the tax experts stay with the IMF and OECD, and a few specialized nonprofits.

But many NGOs are good at one thing that would be very useful in the process of developing / improving a tax system: facilitating citizen participation. Citizens should have a voice in these discussions, and since many NGOs have experience at facilitating citizen participation when it comes to public services, policy advocacy, or indigenous rights, they could bring this expertise to bear on the tax system as well. This could mean: hiring local staff with some knowledge of tax policy and using these staff to develop a clear, feasible advocacy ask that citizen groups could push for; convening national or provincial-level forums where marginalized groups could represent their interests to policymakers; or working closely with government and international agencies to facilitate participatory consultations. Also, NGOs could advocate themselves to governments that reducing inequality be a significant goal of tax policy.

If more people have more ownership of tax policy, there is likely to be a greater sense of ownership over how those taxes are spent – aka public services. NGOs have traditionally been focused on the public services side, but it seems they may be able to effectively influence the financing of those public services too, to ensure it is fair to the poor whose interests they have at the heart of their missions. Maybe some NGOs are doing this already, and I would love to see how this could work in practice!

Just food for thought.

*An aside – good for them! Here in DC, most development orgs act more on their interest to not be seen stirring politically controversial pots…

RCTs – what type of learning?

Could somebody do a rigorous impact evaluation of whether all the rigorous impact evaluations out there are actually having an impact on improving outcomes for people in developing countries?

Probably not, but this is essentially the question that Lant Pritchett is asking in his latest Center for Global Development blog post. In short, he argues that the value of writing more economics papers about the impact of projects is pretty much taken on faith, without showing any evidence that those papers are changing anything. His basic argument goes: “While it might be the case that RCTs could accelerate poverty reduction this was (and is) a faith-based, not evidence-based, claim.”

Pritchett’s irony is sharp, though it doesn’t necessarily prove anything either. Of course, he’s right that believing in the value of RCTs involves a degree of faith. All policy involves a degree of faith. Of course, the randomistas are also right that people can learn more from evidence.

But what type of learning? Perhaps this is the real question we should be asking – not the yes-or-no “is anyone learning anything?” question, but rather, “how are we learning?”

Pritchett’s implication, in organizational learning language, is that the RCT fad justifies itself based on Single-Loop Learning – that we are getting better at doing evaluations and RCTs. But, he implies, that there is no evidence that Double-Loop Learning is happening – aka learning about whether RCTs are actually making anything better.

To explore this question through learning language, again we must distinguish between single and double loop learning. The single loop question asks whether an RCT helped somebody do better something that was already being done. A good example is deworming. A lot of studies have showed that deworming in schools improves health and educational achievement of kids. And, a lot of development programs, and even governments, have taken up this model. J-PAL, when it helped the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh scale up a policy of deworming in schools, made its argument based on evidence from these RCTs.

That’s an easy one – deworming works pretty much the same everywhere. What about issues that are far more contextualized?

An example here could be gender and microfinance. Initial evidence praised the effects of microfinance on women’s empowerment, but a big study in 2009 from MIT questioned the gospel and soon many other critical studies emerged as well. They suggested that access to small loans can actually have a detrimental effect on women’s empowerment, for example by increasing women’s workload in the household, pulling girls from school to help run family businesses, or allowing men to spend their wives’ loans but still forcing the wife to pay it back. Of course, each of these studies happened in a specific context, and the results didn’t necessarily apply to every microfinance program. Still, it sent shockwaves through the whole development community.

The point is, people started asking new questions. Deeper, more critical questions. And these questions made their way, quickly, into the mainstream as practitioners and organizations realized they needed to take a more critical look at their assumptions and their data. And when assumptions are questioned, double-loop learning can occur.

Did we need RCTs to figure this out? Well, here I’ll take it on faith that RCTs have helped, at least to spread the news faster. No doubt the disadvantages of microfinance would have leaked into mainstream practice eventually, but the splash of a high-profile study can provide the shock it takes to spur critical reflection, and for tougher questions to spread more quickly.

Again from Lant, writing last November: “RCTs are one hammer in the development toolkit and previously protruding nails were ignored for lack of a hammer, but not every development problem is a nail.”

True words. Some are nails, others aren’t. The best answers to difficult questions often only lead to more questions – but even if they do, we know we are starting to ask the right questions, and engaging in deeper learning.

 

The most important questions – are they answerable?

The short version: Questions without clear answers are still worth asking. In international development, as elsewhere. 

The longer version: 

The Sheffield Institute for International Development has launched “ID100”, an initiative to determine “the 100 most important questions in international development.” I do appreciate them crowdsourcing this. But sadly, their name is misleading. Its proper name should be, “100 of the most important questions in research into international development.” 

Sure, that’s not as exciting or marketable. But they limit their questions  to only those that have a “factual answer” that can be “addressed by a research team” and that “must not be answerable by ‘it all depends’.” (See the full criteria below.) By bounding the “most important questions” with these constraints, they imply that unanswerable questions, “it depends” questions and non-factual questions (eg political, cultural, …) are so unimportant, they don’t even belong in the first 10 pages of your Google results. These types of questions may not make for neat and tidy research. I don’t deny or diminish the importance of research in development. But, neither should SIID diminish the importance of the many relevant questions that don’t have clear answers, which development researchers, practitioners, policymakers (global and national) can choose to ask, or not to ask.

These unanswerable questions are immensely valuable: they bring new perspectives to the debate, they lead to more relevant questions that may have otherwise been buried, and they allow us to take highly context-specific information into account. If, as SIID implies, we should only be asking the questions with clear answers, we are missing all of this, and deluding ourselves that A should always lead to B.

But we have a choice – to ask, or not to ask. And if we choose not to ask, if we decide that these questions aren’t important, we lose

Some examples of highly relevant questions that don’t meet SIID’s criteria:

What political constraints does evidence-based policymaking face in development settings?

How do my personal biases – based on gender, culture, upbringing, religion, etc – affect my professional judgment?

How does the cultural relevance of curricula affect how much, or how well, students learn?

Why don’t they meet the criteria? Because the answer depends on so many factors, and because those factors and their interactions are constantly changing, aka there is no factual answer. However, these questions are very relevant to those researchers, practitioners, and policymakers – in understanding the context of their work and the impact that they can have.

Their criteria for submitted questions are below.

• Must be answerable through a realistic research design,
• Must be of a spatial and temporal scope that reasonably could be addressed by a research team
• Must not be formulated as a general topic area
• Must have a factual answer and must not be answerable with ‘it all depends’
• Except if questioning a precise statement (e.g. ‘does the earth go round the sun?’), should not be answerable by ‘yes’ or ‘no’
• If related to impact and interventions, must contain a subject, an intervention, and a measurable outcome

Some music to help us ponder: “The Unanswered Question” by Charles Ives. (If you don’t know it, listen for the trumpet and the flute. Actually, don’t listen for anything – just listen.)

Power of Marketing – and not just for the product

This ad sells Congo-Brazzaville an image of itself. For Guinness, of course the most important message is, Drink Guinness and Feel Empowered. But that’s not the only message that’s there. Be Congolese and Feel Empowered. Express Yourself and Feel Empowered.

Of course, “Empowered” is the development way to phrase it. Someone else might say, “Feel Powerful”.

Is Guinness making people feel more powerful for their own gain? Sure. Is that a bad thing? The way they do it, I don’t think so. It’s highlighting a positive empowerment – not negative towards any person or group, and not making feel bad for not doing anything. The “be proud to express yourself as working-class Congolese” and “be proud to drink Guinness” messages are intertwined, but that doesn’t diminish the first one, which is an important one in its own right.

In development, when we “do empowerment work”, it’s easy to forget that empowerment is about… power. People having more power to do what they want. To empower people, we try to remove the constraints that they face (eg. cultural restrictions on women moving outside the house) and give them more useful tools (eg. new savings products). But often they are the ones that are easily seen. And it’s hard to see how people feel.

There’s a quote from Game of Thrones (of which many development nerds who are also real nerds may be aware): “Power resides where men believe it resides.”

If we remove constraints and provide tools, but people don’t feel powerful – don’t believe in their own power – how much can we really empower them?

Not that the first two aren’t important, nor that they can’t lead to the third. But that third part – belief in one’s own power – is the clincher, I think, and something we should consider more.

DC act of kindness

Snow was falling, and sidewalks were already slick with a half-inch of wet snow. A woman walked with her cane up to the crosswalk, clearly working hard not to fall, and assessed her options for getting across once the light turned. A young woman came up behind her, and the light turned. The young woman, seeing the other struggling, reached out her hand, and said a word. A connection was made. The one helped the other across the puddle against the curb, across the street, and over the opposite puddle. All the way, two mouths moved and two heads nodded, affirming human connection and human dignity with friendly words. Then they were on the far sidewalk. The initial reason for their connection gone, I thought I saw the young woman hesitate for a split second, as if making a decision. Just a split second. Then, her choice made, the two figures continued slowly together, the connection still visible even through the snow, until they were out of sight. 

When I moved to DC, I was worried that everyone would be focused on themselves and on the “who you know” game. I didn’t expect there was much room for simple kindnesses to strangers.

Perhaps this was unfair. Last night waiting for the bus at Cleveland Park, watching this scene unfold, my belief in the good inherent in human nature was reinforced. Even in this town.

 

Benefits of being top of the class?

Is that arrogant, smiling guy or girl giving your graduation speech actually going to be more successful? An interesting study from the UK suggests that, maybe they will, but perhaps not for the reasons you think… or maybe we all just knew it all along.

Essentially, they found that being a big fish in a small pond is better than being a equally big fish in a pond full of huge fish. The study finds that (take a breath…) kids who were in the top of their class in primary school had better test scores in secondary school, than kids who had the same scores in primary school but were in better schools, putting them in the middle of their class.

The money quote: “Non-cognitive skills such as confidence, perseverance and resilience have big effects on achievement.”

But. I would also be very interested to see how they controlled for the “inherent motivation” factor – the question of whether that confidence is inherent and not a result of their environment, and those kids were more inclined to achieve better test scores in both primary and secondary school anyway. I guess I should read the whole paper…

I am a Development Handyman. Here is my Toolbox.

Monitoring tools, systems strengthening tools, tools to build capacity of community-based groups, tools for gender assessment. A complete set of screwdrivers and wrenches.

We in development sometimes throw around this word as if we were a carpenter, to describe the things we use to help us do our job better. They might be guidelines, training curricula, or lists of indicators with a description of the best way to measure them. And though the title of this post is sarcastic, I don’t mean to disparage the incredible work, rigorous evidence, and highly-informed expertise that have gone into creating – and successfully using – many of them.

But what does the word “tool” imply? That they are standardized and will work the same anywhere? That we have them in our belt and, when the situation arises, we can pull out the right one for the job? That by banging a few nails and tightening a few screws, we can predict what will (or won’t) happen as a result?

Working in international development from the faraway land of Washington, DC, I am always interested by the little tricks of language that are used here – intentionally or not – that give us the impression (illusion?) of our own mastery and control over what happens in our programs. Nobody has devious intentions (or at least, very few in the NGO world), and everybody will affirm the importance of adapting to local context, and be genuine about it. Everybody knows that folks in DC can only have a certain amount of control over what happens on the ground in developing countries. Still, we use these words that let us believe (and perhaps more to the point, let donors believe) that we do have control. That the problems are linear and un-complex. That technical approaches are enough, and political considerations are irrelevant. That we have the right tools for the job.